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Eastern Regional Meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers Concurrent Paper Abstracts

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Eastern Regional Meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers Concurrent Paper Abstracts Eastern Regional Meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers Concurrent Paper Abstracts Majid Amini, Virginia State University From Absolute to Maximal God: Would that Solve the Problem? The classical monotheistic concept of God has been bedeviled by a plethora of logical and metaphysical paradoxes. Recently there have been a number of attempts claiming that by reforming the traditional concept of God as an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent being to a concept of God as the being with maximal consistent set of knowledge, power and benevolence, the monotheistic concept of God can be rescued from contradictions and thereby reinstating a viable version of Anselmian theism. By focusing on omnipotence specifically, the purpose of this paper is therefore twofold: (1) to show the logical impossibility of maintaining an absolute or infinite conception of divine attributes, and (2) to show that even a maximal conception of divine attributes is plagued with the problem of uniqueness of God and a variant of the paradox of omnipotence thus indicating that such reformulations are still beset with dilemmas and paradoxes. Greg Bassham, King’s College A Critique of C. S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire In various places, C. S. Lewis offers an argument for God and/or a heavenly afterlife that is now widely called the argument from desire. Lewis appears to give at least two versions of the argument, one inductive and the other deductive. Both versions focus on a special form of spiritual or transcendental longing that Lewis calls “Joy.” The gist of his deductive argument is this: Joy is an innate, natural desire. All innate, natural desires have possible satisfactions. So, Joy must have a possible satisfaction. But Joy does not have a possible satisfaction in this world. Therefore, Joy must have a possible satisfaction in the next world. In this paper, I examine both the inductive and deductive versions of Lewis’s argument from desire, and argue that neither version succeeds. Anthony Bolos , Virginia Commonwealth University Re-Imagining the Imago Dei I offer a compatible account of understanding the theology of the imago Dei in conjunction with contemporary views in evolutionary biology. I discuss two related problems: First, there is the theological challenge to explain—or even merely to describe—the special nature of humankind in the face of evolutionary science. Second, there is the challenge to provide an account of exactly when humans became God’s image bearers. In response to the first challenge I argue that the special nature of humans is that we are uniquely equipped to be God’s image bearers. In response to the second challenge I argue that humans became God’s image bearers at the moment they were apt to serve in this unique role. I also claim that my account does not come with any theological disadvantages when considering the evolutionary origins of modern humans and further provides an important philosophical insight: namely, humans, in this environment as God’s image bearers, couldn’t have been significantly different than they currently are. Kenneth Boyce, University of Missouri Andrew Moon, Rutgers University 1 In Defense of Proper Functionalism: Cognitive Science Takes on Swampman According to proper functionalist theories of warrant, a belief is warranted only if it is formed by cognitive faculties that are properly functioning according to a good, truth-aimed design plan. A formidable challenge to proper functionalism is the Swampman objection, according to which there are possible scenarios involving creatures who have warranted beliefs but whose cognitive faculties are not properly functioning. In this paper, we draw lessons from cognitive science to argue that the Swampman objection fails by showing that the underlying, central intuition motivating it is false. Aaron Brooks, Florida State University Science, Religion, and Incompatibility: Can Philosophy of Science Help? Attempts to discredit religion by using science seem to assume the rationale of two major, heavily-critiqued philosophies of science: logical positivism and critical rationalism. As a case study, this essay will show the correlation between these two philosophies and the writing of philosopher of science Alex Rosenberg. Rather than critiquing Rosenberg via critiques of these philosophies, I will attempt to show the compatibility of science and religion when these philosophies are assumed. The essay will proceed by first explicating logical positivism, especially as evidenced in the thought of Moritz Schlick and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the second section, the essay will explore the critical rationalism of Karl Popper. At the end of each section, it will be argued that if something like the logic of these two respective schools is being employed by critics like Rosenberg, religious claims can still function compatibly with science. Donald Bungum, Saint Louis University Revealed to the Little Ones: Love, Presence, and Hiddenness In the debate over divine hiddenness, one crucial question concerns whether explicit belief in God’s existence is required for relationship with God. In this paper, I argue that explicit belief in God’s existence is not required, and I contend that one can hold this view without positing a defective relationship between God and human beings. Following Eleonore Stump, I first argue that love is fulfilled between lovers just when they are fully and personally present to one another. I then use results from developmental psychology to argue that the capacity to be mutually personally present does not require the capacity for propositional thought. These claims support a model of divine-human relationship on which the following analogy holds: just as infants can have meaningful relationships with their caregivers while lacking explicit beliefs about them, so adult human beings can have meaningful relationships with God while lacking explicit belief in His existence. Laura Frances Callahan, Rutgers University Evil: Only Sometimes Evidence against God Benton, Hawthorne, and Isaacs (forthcoming) claim, contra sceptical theism, that evil must be evidence against God’s existence, because the absence of evil would be (presumably excellent) evidence for it. Their argument is an interesting one, and valid. But even if we accept its somewhat controversial premises, its implications are far more limited than they suggest. Seeing this requires no endorsement of sceptical theism but just a more natural way of drawing 2 distinctions between epistemic possibilities. If one could learn simply ‘that there was evil,’ perhaps via an oracle, one would gain evidence against God. But when we commonly observe that there is evil in the world, we learn a proposition much stronger. And determining the evidential impact of that much stronger proposition, about the specific amount and types of evil as well as good there are in the world, remains a complex affair. Eddy Keming Chen, Rutgers University Daniel Rubio, Rutgers University Pascal’s Wager Meets Surreal Numbers Although expected utility theory has proven a fruitful and elegant theory in the finite realm, attempts to generalize it to include infinite utilities have resulted in many para- doxes. Nevertheless, one of the most venerable decision problems—Pascal’s Wager— employ exactly these things. In this paper, we argue that the use of John Conway’s surreal numbers shall provide a firm mathematical foundation for transfinite decision theory. To that end, we prove a surreal representation theorem and show that our surreal decision theory respects dominance reasoning even in the infinite case. We apply our theory to bear on Pascal’s Wager and two objections against it: Mixed Strategies and Many Gods.After formulating the two objections in the framework of surreal utilities and probabilities, our theory correctly predicts that (1) the pure “Christian” strategy beats all mixed strategies, and (2) what one should do in a Pascalian decision problem depends on what one’s credence function is like. Our analysis therefore suggests that although Pascal’s Wager is mathematically coherent, it does not deliver what it purports to do, i.e. convince people that they should lead a Christian life regardless of how confident they are in theism and its alternatives. Nevin Climenhaga, University of Notre Dame Epistemic Probabilities: A Guide for the Perplexed The epistemic probability of A given B – notated P(A|B) – is the degree to which B supports, or makes plausible, A. In general, if P(A|B) = n, then someone with B as their evidence ought to be confident in A to degree n. A persistently difficult question in epistemology is how to determine the values of epistemic probabilities, so characterized. The project of answering this question has two parts: a formal part and a substantive part. The formal part breaks down the probabilities in question to their most “epistemically accessible” components, via identities like Bayes’ Theorem. The substantive part tells us how to calculate these “atomic” or “direct” probabilities. In this paper I undertake the formal part of this project. I argue that direct probabilities are ones given to propositions by their causes or explanations, and that given plausible assumptions about the structure of explanation, we can combine direct probabilities so characterized to obtain indirect probabilities. Dustin Crummet, University of Notre Dame Theodicy for Creeping Things Philosophers of religion, even those working on the problem of animal suffering, have largely ignored “lower
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